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Sparse foliage hide the entryway. One sloping wooden tunnel leads down to a brightly lit reception area. There is a operating ward, equipped with gurneys, cardiac monitors and ventilators. And cabinets stocked of medical equipment, medications and organized stacks of extra garments. Within a staff room with a washing machine and hot water heater, doctors monitor a display. It shows the flight patterns of Russian surveillance UAVs as they weave in the sky above.

Hospital personnel at an subterranean medical center look at a monitor showing enemy kamikaze and reconnaissance drones in the region.

This is the nation's covert below-ground hospital. This center began operations in August and is the second of its kind, situated in the eastern part of the country not far from the combat zone and the city of Pokrovsk in Donetsk oblast. “Our facility sits 6 metres under the earth. It’s the most secure method of providing help to our wounded military personnel. And it keeps medical personnel protected,” stated the clinic’s lead doctor, Major the chief surgeon.

The stabilisation point handles 30-40 casualties a day. Cases differ widely. Some have devastating limb trauma necessitating surgical removal, or serious stomach wounds. Some patients can walk. Almost all are the casualties of Russian FPV drones, which drop explosives with deadly precision. “Ninety per cent of our cases are from FPVs. We encounter minimal bullet injuries. This is an era of drones and a new type of war,” the surgeon explained.

Major the senior surgeon at the underground facility for treating injured soldiers in eastern Ukraine.

On one afternoon last week, three soldiers limped into the facility. The most lightly injured, twenty-eight-year-old Artem Dvorskyi, said an first-person view drone blast had ripped a minor wound in his limb. “Conflict is terrible. My comrade next to me, a fellow soldier, was killed,” he stated. “He fell down. Subsequently the Russians released a another grenade on him.” He added: “Everything in the settlement is destroyed. There are UAVs all around and bodies. Ours and the enemy's.”

Dvorskyi said his squad spent over a month in a forest area close to Pokrovsk, which Russia has been attempting to capture since last year. The only way to get to their position was on foot. All supplies came by drone: rations and water. Seven days following he was injured, he walked five kilometers (about 3 miles), requiring several hours, to where an military transport was able to evacuate him. At the clinic, a medical staff assessed his vital signs. After treatment, a medical attendant gave him fresh civilian clothes: a T-shirt and a set of pale denim trousers.

The soldier, twenty-eight, stated a first-person view aerial device caused a small hole in his leg.

Another patient, 38-year-old a serviceman, recounted a UAV explosion had left him with concussion. “I was in a dugout. Suddenly it went dark. I couldn’t feel any feeling or hear anything,” he said. “I think I was lucky to remain alive. My cousin has been lost. We face continuous detonations.” A construction worker working in Lithuania, he said he had returned to Ukraine and enlisted to serve days before the Russian leader's full-scale invasion in early 2022.

A third soldier, a serviceman, had been hit in the back. He expressed pain as medical staff laid him on a bed, took off a stained bandage and treated his two-day-old injury from fragments. Covered in a foil blanket, he used a mobile phone to ring his sister. “A piece of artillery hit me. The cause was a ricochet. My condition is stable,” he informed her. What were his plans now? “To recover. This may require a few months. Subsequently, to return to my unit. Our forces must defend our country,” he affirmed.

Medical staff care for Taras Mykolaichuk, who was injured in the dorsal area by a fragment of artillery shell.

Over the past years, enemy forces has consistently targeted medical centers, health facilities, maternity wards and ambulances. According to human rights groups, 261 health workers have been killed in almost two thousand assaults. The underground facility is constructed from multiple reinforced shelters, with wooden supports, soil and sand laid on top up to the surface. It is designed to resist direct hits from large-caliber artillery shells and even multiple 8kg TNT charges dropped by aerial means.

A major steel and mining company, which financed the building, intends to build twenty facilities in all. The head of the nation's security agency and former defence minister, the official, said they would be “critically essential for preserving the lives of our armed forces and assisting troops on the battlefront.” The company described the project as the “most ambitious and challenging” it had implemented since the enemy's invasion.

An example of the facility's surgical rooms.

The surgeon, explained some wounded personnel had to endure delays many hours or even multiple days before they could be evacuated because of the danger of aerial attacks. “We had a pair of severely injured patients who came at 3am. I had to perform a removal of both limbs on one of them. His bleeding control device had been on for so long there was no alternative.” What is his method with traumatic surgeries? “My career in healthcare for two decades. You have to concentrate,” he remarked.

Orderlies transported Mykolaichuk up the passage and into an emergency vehicle. The transport was parked beneath a shrub. He and the two other soldiers were taken to the city of a major city for further treatment. The underground hospital staff took a break. The facility's orange feline, Vasilevs, walked toward the entrance to await the next arrivals. “Our facility operates active 24 hours a day,” the surgeon stated. “The work is continuous.”